The brutality of being a bridesmaid

Spectator

21-05-2025

There stands the bride. Perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect fake tan. She may not have slept the previous night or eaten for six months but, still, she's beaming. And there behind her stand the bridesmaids. All 95 of them.
When Kathryn McGowan got married in County Down this month, she couldn't decide which of her pals should have the honour of holding her train and checking she didn't have lipstick on her teeth. 'It was quite stressful,' she said of the dilemma, 'and then one day the idea came to me.' Instead of having the average number of bridesmaids (in the UK, this is three to five), she'd have 95 of them, aged between six and 40.
The colour scheme was 'champagne and cream', but nobody had to be matching, presumably because it was too difficult to find a neckline that worked on children as well as women approaching perimenopause. In a radio interview a week or so after the wedding, the groom joked that his best man was 'still dancing'.
If you're on bridesmaid duty this summer, consider yourself fortunate if, like the Irish lot, you get to pick your own dress. This is less and less often the case. Instead, bridesmaids are often shoehorned into sludgy green, peach or maroon, a shade more normally used for Travelodge curtains (in fact some frocks could double for window dressings). They hang shapelessly, clinging to the wrong bits, they're polyester and it's a hot day, and why did these women even say yes to being a bridesmaid in the first place? 'Say cheese,' coaxes the unbearably chirpy photographer, and – wearily – they all try another smile.
As we stagger into another wedding season, will nobody think of the poor bridesmaids? Because although weddings have become bigger, more expensive, more outlandish, more and more designed for social media, the bridesmaid experience hasn't changed much.